Fired CIA intelligence analyst Mary McCarthy has reportedly confessed to leaking facts about the CIA's top-secret terrorist jails in Europe and Southwest Asia to Dana Priest of the Washington Post. As Priest basks in the glory of the Pulitzer Prize she won for those stories, McCarthy is alternately being investigated for criminal prosecution and hailed as a brave crusader for truth, justice and The American Way.

McCarthy is not, as one pundit said, a courageous American citizen exercising her First Amendment rights against an outrageous government policy. If there are no restrictions enforced by law, then there are no secrets. McCarthy is a traitor, someone who leaked top secret information and damaged our national security, risked the lives of Americans fighting a war, and disrupted our relations with nations that had been working with us against a new kind of enemy. McCarthy was an employee, not a policy maker. She has never been elected by the American people or appointed by the President to a position that would have entitled her to disclose that information. (And neither have the senators and congressmen who have leaked facts just as sensitive as those McCarthy passed on to Dana Priest.) Comparing McCarthy's crime to the President's decision to reveal details of a National Intelligence Estimate is a political argument based on a falsehood. The PPresident is the ultimate classification authority. When he decides to reveal information he is exercising one of the powers of the office to which he was elected.

McCarthy took advantage of the position she had been entrusted and violated her legal obligations. Serving in the CIA's inspector general's office, she had a special responsibility. The IG's office is legally authorized to be privy to compartmented information, the highest level of classification. Other CIA employees only see bits and pieces of such information because the compartmentalization system is designed to prevent all but a few top people to see all the pieces and know what they mean in the larger context. She violated her highest duty because her political beliefs were opposed to the policy that the President had established. Her disclosure was politically motivated. She wanted to thwart the policy of the President, and she achieved her goal by committing a felony. McCarthy should be prosecuted and punished to the fullest extent the law allows. As should her fellow CIA leakers and manipulators of policy.

McCarthy was not alone among the CIA's analysts and decision makers. As I have written many times, the CIA has been in open revolt against the President since 9-11. Failing to foresee the fall of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attacks before, including and after 9-11, and just about everything else that mattered, the CIA has been an utter failure in the mission it was created to perform. Instead, it has been operating covertly against the government by mounting operations such as the Joe Wilson Niger trip, which was planned and performed only to discredit the President's position that Iraq was seeking uranium for a revived nuclear weapons program. CIA bureaucrats have been spending a lot of time and effort to discredit the President while fighting against the change that will transform it from the failure it has been to an agency that can meet the needs of a nation at war. And in doing so it has fueled the opposition press with these leaks.

America's free press is supposed to be one of the guardians of our freedom. But while the press is free it must also be responsible, and in this it fails comprehensively. The New York Times published the stories of the NSA terrorist surveillance program even after the President made a personal appeal to maintain the secrecy of one of our most highly valued secret programs (probably leaked by McCarthy's CIA pals or their cohorts in NSA and other agencies).

We are at war. Every American, regardless of his job, has a duty to protect the interests of this nation and to place his loyalty to our nation above his own career or political agenda. We aren't talking about Washington gossip, little secrets leaked by little people to raise their status from a "B-list" guest to the "A-list" for the right cocktail parties. We are talking about the essentials for fighting this war that, if revealed as the NSA program and the CIA secret prisons were, can mean the difference between winning the war and enabling our enemies to hit us again as they did on 9-11.

The liberal media is so consumed with its hatred for George Bush that it has lost any sense of loyalty to our nation. This year it gave its highest professional award -- the Pulitzer Prize -- to Dana Priest for her CIA prisons stories and to James Risen, the New York Times reporter who wrote the stories that revealed the NSA terrorist surveillance program. There is not even a debate among the press about whether these reporters should be chastised instead of rewarded. To the contrary, these Pulitzer Prizes make every reporter more eager to discover and publish America's secrets regardless of the consequences to our soldiers and our nation.

How many times have we seen the president subjected to lectures about introspection and demands for apologies by the White House press corps? If reporters, editors and publishers were publicly subjected to that same critical examination they might regain their sense of responsibility to the nation. And they might, in a moment of private introspection, regain the perspective that freedom of the press is not the only essential right enshrined in the Constitution. If a free press is not responsible, it cannot be a defender of freedom. It can become the enemy of all who fight in defense of our way of life. What will they publish next?

Treason. Send the ATF to the new dork times office and demand their immediate surrender. If they refuse burn the bloody building down. Janet Reno set the precedent for that, time for the liberals to live with the legacy of their golden boy klinton.

Juan Williams on Fox yesterday was saying she did the right thing if this is what she believed and did not deserve punishment. I would still be peeking through bars at Leavenworth if I would have told what I knew when holding a Top Secret clearance.

5
posted on 04/24/2006 6:48:03 AM PDT
by Piquaboy
(22 year veteran of the Army, Air Force and Navy, Pray for all our military .)

I just turned on the tube and what I've seen so far, from yesterday and this morn, this HOT potato is being swept under the rug by her buddies the mediaWHORES! This thing ain't going nowhere and no one will be do time in jail! The Sandy Burglar crime was hushed up by the CLYMERS in the media and so will this one!

Had I, or any of my compatriots in the Armed Services leaked this type on info., we would be spending the rest of our days at the Disciplinary Barracks at Beautiful Downtown Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, making little ones out of big ones.

The leftist pacifists don't recognize a state of war. The concept of war was forever destroyed in the 70's. The view is that war is the most reprehensible condition for a nation. Any action or deed that is counter to the notiuon of war is good.

That is why some drastic, fearful, chilling punishment must be widely administered.

"It isn't just the CIA that has problems with former politicals getting knee-deep into this Administration's policy and leaking materials," says a current Bush Administration aide. "We're talking about a situation that we haven't been able to deal with in a manner in which we'd want. But this Mary McCarthy case may help us."

The aide is referring to the firing last week of a CIA employee working in the agency's Office of Inspector General. One of McCarthy's jobs was investigating allegations of torture by CIA employees or contractors at Iraqi prisons. The CIA fired McCarthy on evidence that she was one of the sources for Washington Post reporter Dana Priest's report on so-called "Black Site" prisons in Europe and elsewhere that housed captured al Qaeda, Taliban, and some senior Iraqi military and intelligence individuals.

Unresolved is whether McCarthy also leaked material to the left-wing organization, Human Rights Watch, which clearly was also a key source to Priest. (Note this quote in Priest's now-Pulitzer Prize winning story: "'I remember asking: What are we going to do with these people?' said a senior CIA officer. 'I kept saying, where's the help? We've got to bring in some help. We can't be jailers -- our job is to find Osama.'" Was this McCarthy?)

McCarthy's background is just becoming increasingly fleshed out, including her ties to former National Security Advisor Sandy "Sox" Berger and the Clinton White House. McCarthy was appointed Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs by Berger in 1998. She replaced Rand Beers.

According to former Kerry campaign staffers, Beers, who served as a senior adviser to Kerry's campaign, spoke of having continued access to CIA and national security data from former colleagues still in government.

"He said he still had friends willing to help the Kerry campaign from inside," says a former staffer. "We always assumed that guys like Beers and Berger were in touch with these people. I'm not talking about having secure material leaked to us, but our national security folks always seemed to be in the know." The former staffer said he never recalled mention of any names.

But all of this is now past tense, and the White House, as well as senior staff at the Departments of Justice, State, and Defense, are attempting to identify possible leakers among their own career staffs with access to information that might be helpful to Democrats or the press.

Of greatest concern is the Department of Justice, the nexus of many terrorism and national security cases that would involve the White House, Defense and State Departments, as well as briefings on Capitol Hill to congressional leadership.

"We know we have people leaking materials. It's been an ongoing problem, but until someone has taken the first step, and the McCarthy case would appear to be the first step, it's hard to move against career staff," says a current Defense Department staffer. "We have an IG looking at all kinds of things right now. Perhaps we'll get some movement."

The Sandy Burglar crime was hushed up by the CLYMERS in the media and so will this one!

Don't kid yourself. It's naive to believe that with the GOP in charge of the Presidency, the House & Senate that it was the media or the dems that let Sandy Berger off. Some kind of deal was done, and it still stinks to high heaven. I'm convinced that some heavy duty blackmail and/or threats from Clinton's goon/hit squad are involved. And no, I'm not wearing a tin foil hat!

Today, I am disapproving H.R. 4392, the "Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001," because of one badly flawed provision that would have made a felony of unauthorized disclosures of classified information. Although well intentioned, that provision is overbroad and may unnecessarily chill legitimate activities that are at the heart of a democracy.

~~~~~SNIP~~~~~~~

Similarly, the legislation may unduly restrain the ability of former Government officials to teach, write, or engage in any activity aimed at building public understanding of complex issues. Incurring such risks is unnecessary and inappropriate in a society built on freedom of expression and the consent of the governed and is particularly inadvisable in a context in which the range of classified materials is so extensive. In such circumstances, this criminal provision would, in my view, create an undue chilling effect.

2,693 posted on 04/24/2006 9:54:14 AM EDT by JaneAustin

24
posted on 04/24/2006 7:06:15 AM PDT
by Mo1
("Stupidity is also a gift from God, but it should not be abused." Pope John Paul II)

Treason. Send the ATF to the new dork times office and demand their immediate surrender. If they refuse burn the bloody building down. Janet Reno set the precedent for that, time for the liberals to live with the legacy of their golden boy klinton.

I would agree, as long as when they're done they disband the ATF and offer all those ATF agents the opportunity to go patrol the border.

27
posted on 04/24/2006 7:08:56 AM PDT
by SittinYonder
(That's how I saw it, and see it still.)

I fear you are correct. I don't understand why she wasn't arrested on the spot. It seems that this Admisistration just doesn't have the stomach for going after these traitors. I will NEVER understand the Berger wrist-slap.

If he was making a point about "following your conscience" and being willing to suffer the consequences of breaking the law (sounds like aiding our enemies in time of war to me!), he's on very dangerous ground. Anyone could use that as an excuse to do ANYTHING, if they are willing to suffer the legal consequences. I'm sure many domestic terrorists have said their acts of violence were "dictated by their conscience."

Execution is indeed the punishment for espionage, as was given to the Rosenbergs. My question for Ms. McCarthy and her pals is this: if you now have the power to decide what national security secrets can be revealed to the media, no matter how much this aids and abets the enemies of the United States, and no matter your own oath of office or laws you are sworn to uphold, what is stopping any ordinary American citizen from meting out the proper punishment for such espionage to YOU? Laws are mere formalities, right? So anyone can shoot you on the street and be within his rights as an American protecting his country from traitors. See where this leads?

We are at war. Every American, regardless of his job, has a duty to protect the interests of this nation and to place his loyalty to our nation above his own career or political agenda. We aren't talking about Washington gossip, little secrets leaked by little people to raise their status from a "B-list" guest to the "A-list" for the right cocktail parties. We are talking about the essentials for fighting this war that, if revealed as the NSA program and the CIA secret prisons were, can mean the difference between winning the war and enabling our enemies to hit us again as they did on 9-11.

Exactly me too. As a former security control official in the service during a time of war, I can not believe these disloyal pukes who put the lives of our troops at risk. This Attorney General better be making a case on her and that of Sandy Burgler.

Juan's statement and that old lady (blonde) on the weekend show of Neal Cavuto's just outraged me. She basically said that she trusted Iran more than President Bush. What a dunce. I hope people watching avoid doing business with her and her company. Let her sell her homes and real estate in Iran.

Since there is no proof of the secret prisons, is there any chance that this was bogus info given Mary McCarthy because they knew she was a traitor rat? And how about someone winning a Pulitzer for a fictitious news story?

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